Hangover Man awoke with a moan on his couch. The winter light was raw, retina-searing white. He had been snoring heavily, and he was horribly dehydrated. His lips were gummed with the paste of desiccated saliva and stained from last night’s booze. He swung his legs over the side of the couch and held his head in his hands, assuming the internationally recognized pose of suffering. A few snippets of things he’d said and done emerged from the static of his memory — he could only hope that everybody else had been drunk enough not to notice or care. Unbidden, another frightening thought began to worm its way to the surface of his mind. This was just another weekend, and he’d have to do it all again soon.

We have always been this guy. Pre-modern cultures all over the world started brewing alcohol independently of each other. The same can’t be said for the development of, say, the wheel, or writing. Through every historical time period, humans have been drinking a lot. But while the amount of drinking itself may not have changed, the consequences of waking up hungover have. In fact, the consequences of your hangover say a lot about the time and place you live in — certainly more than how much you drank last night.

Drinking is so deeply interwoven in our culture that as we’ve moved through history, old drinking archetypes and ancient cultural norms around drinking have clung to us. Even as opinions of what drinking says about a person have changed, we drink in many of the same ways as we always have. While we drink, we act out roles that were written into our cultural history centuries ago — whether or not we stayed awake in a single history class.

Hangover Man may be fictional, but we do have incontrovertible evidence that excessive merrymaking (especially during holidays and festivals) is a huge part of human history.

What time period’s attitudes toward drinking had the most in common with our own? For ritualized overindulgence combined with a rigorous work ethic, Ancient Rome is the closest. Early in their history, Romans, like the Ancient Greeks, were praised for their sobriety and saw moderation as a mark of civilization. It was considered barbaric to get totally sh*tfaced — only the Germanic Barbarians from beyond the Rhine would drink to excess, or so the Romans thought. But as the Republic became an Empire, elite Romans routinely drank until they vomited at late-night dinners (giving rise to the myth of the vomitorium) and great statesmen like Cato the Younger were seen smashed and staggering through the streets at dawn. How did this happen?

At first, wine in Ancient Rome was considered a staple drink. Romans mixed it with water so they could drink it throughout the day without a loss of productivity. Even field slaves were expected to down five gallons of the rotgut per week, and, on average, every citizen of the empire could look forward to downing a whole bottle of the good stuff every single day. Going about your business slightly buzzed in the ancient world was considered good for gettin’ ‘er done. And it is true that, consumed with water, and metabolized throughout the day, this amount of wine does not cause drunkenness. It was only during religious feast days or when worshiping the actual God of Wine that the Romans got fully wasted.

But as the empire grew more powerful and decadent, merchants and aristocrats would serve stronger wines at their feasts, and some began to follow the lead of the most debauched emperors in order to try and claim higher status for themselves. (Overproof spirits trend, anyone?) Furthermore, the Roman leadership began to create more holidays to placate their over-taxed and overworked citizens (*cough* holiday party season kickoff on Thanksgiving *cough*).

When their drinking was restricted to daily consumption and to actual holidays when drinking played a role defined by tradition, the Romans saw themselves as temperate relative to other cultures. It was when parties became stages upon which the vanities and the jostling for status of the upper classes were acted out that Rome began to see itself as experiencing a crisis of excess.

So how would our Hangover Man fare in ancient Rome? Unless he burned a dozen slaves alive during a drunken orgy, and, dressed in the skin of a wild beast, commenced to ravaging male and female servants tethered to stakes inside a specially constructed cage while roaring with sadistic pleasure, he wouldn’t really consider that he had gone overboard.